Research Agenda & Themes

As an urban geographer and political ecologist, my research explores themes of socio-ecological change, environmental expertise, and urban water politics in the global South. In addition, my work explores the intersections of eviction, displacement, and adaptation to environmental threats. I am also interested in critical and feminist perspectives on the production of knowledge, particularly climate science.

Navigating The Waters Of Flood Mitigation In Jakarta: Promoting and Contesting Expert Knowledges

Funded by the UCLA International Institute, the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative & The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Department of Geography, my PhD thesis closely traces the promotion, circulation and contestation of the planned Great Garuda Sea Wall, a USD$40 billion Dutch-designed flood defence project. In addition to a giant sea wall, the design includes plans for an attractive waterfront city build on land reclaimed from Jakarta Bay in the shape of the garuda, a mythical bird and Indonesia’s national symbol. Championed by consultants and bureaucrats as constituting the best solution to flooding, this project is representative of the Indonesian state’s infrastructural approach to flooding, which relies on concrete-heavy, capital-intensive engineering interventions such as sea walls, pumping stations, and river ‘normalization’ (normalisasi).

This highly ambitious, large-scale project stands in stark contrast to attempts to plan with nature, which the same consultancy firms are promoting across North America and Western Europe. Acknowledging that urban flooding is a socio-ecological process that cannot readily be ‘fixed’ through such infrastructural interventions alone, my research examines how and why this approach to flooding prevails in Jakarta. To address this question, my research draws a discourse analysis of engineering and consultancy documents, as well as more than fifty semi-structured interviews with consultants, engineers, bureaucrats, government officials, staff of NGOs, community organizers, reporters, academics, and activists conducted during multi-sited fieldwork in Jakarta and the Netherlands between 2014 and 2017.